Yvonne M Ward shows how a royal reputation was tidied up for posterity - no more sex drive and rude comments about foreigners.

I'm not sure I'm entirely on board with the idea that Lord Esher and AC Benson, yes, one of those Bensons (you could not make them up) were so diametrically opposed - Morris Kaplan in Sodom on the Thames has a substantial ( Read more... )

Further re the people who want to Speak to Somebody rather than emailing, and that young person yesterday who was spamming people via PM about their vampire-novel-in-progress, and remark in locked post on my rlist about someone who goes around connecting to people in a scholarly field rather sitting down and reading the literature...

Maybe it is ( Read more... )

Vogue launches online archive of every American issue in its 119-year history. Yeah, okay, $1,575 is a lot for a year's subscription from the point of view of the individual punter interested in the history that this could disclose: but in terms of what academic journals and some of the other major press databases cost it's minute.

Bluuuuue ( Read more... )

Have been mentally chewing over thoughts evoked by this post by
( Read more... )

He's extremely hit and miss, but every so often Oliver Burkeman makes a telling point in 'This Column Will Change Your Life', in the Guardian Weekend magazine:
[E]nraging people on both sides of an issue doesn't prove you "must be doing something right". You could just be wrong. Pleasing people may not be the path to success. But whatever self-help ( Read more... )

I was thinking, following something elsewhere, about that phenomenon when someone comes up to you and tells that 'People' are expressing an opinion about you or something you did. This is usually something adverse and critical. They may also attribute it to a specific person or persons.

I'm not sure this would always be the case, but pretty often ( Read more... )

Reading this excellent post on how to deal with harassment over at Geek Feminism, I am entirely in accord with the view that this is not a problem for the individual, it's a wider social issue.

I'd also like to point out that the people who are advocating women expressing their response to creepy behaviour by violence, physical or verbal or just by ( Read more... )

While I am usually all over the idea that judgements about What People Really Achieved can be crude and based on coarse indicators, I am not entirely sure that Aditya Chakrabortty persuades me that the late Lord Dacre, historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, is being terribly ill-used by the new biography and the reviews thereof out of sheer career ill- ( Read more... )

Today has been:

*PROOFS*!!! which I am now printing out, in batches, since trying to do the whole thing at once was causing printer errors.

Mad Social Whirl, or at least, unwonted social whirl, with lunch with A from BC and a post-work gathering with members of a scholarly listserv I'm on who happened to be currently in London.

Several of whom were ( Read more... )

His Holiness the Dalai Lama called upon women to help create a more compassionate world.

Sorry, Your Holiness, but I really don't consider asking women to do their usual work of caring and tidying up men's messes, in the name of a more compassionate world, to be enough to qualify you as a feminist. Rly.

How seldom do we find religious leaders ( Read more... )